Backlinking is a term that’s thrown around a lot in the world of SEO and internet marketing, but buying backlinks to boost your website’s search engine rankings is a bad idea – it could backfire badly and leave you worse off than when you started, with poorer rankings and a damaged reputation.
Backlinking is the practice of getting your website’s link shared on other websites around the net. The more reputable the site that links to yours, the more it will improve your website’s ranking – but for backlinks to work with optimum efficiency, they need to be organically generated.
Links to your website from random, irrelevant pages won’t boost your rankings and Google is on to people who try to do it. The US clothing retailer J.C. Penney suffered a devastating blow to its search engine rankings after purchasing backlinks from a company promising to boost its ranking.
Although the tactic worked in the short term, eventually Google cottoned on and penalised the company severely for its unethical practices, causing its ranking in key search terms to fall drastically – in some cases as many as 70 or more places, crippling its searchability.
If you do backlinking right, you can boost traffic to your site and interest in products or sales through a better ranking. You can take actions such as including your website in relevant professional and business listings and directories, guest blogging for websites and blogs with a similar audience to your own and sending out press releases which include a link back to your own website.
Not only are all of these easily achievable with a little hard work, but you won’t fall foul of Google’s clever algorithms!
If you’re considering hiring a marketing agency or web design company to boost your website’s performance and in turn your sales, drop us a line today to see what we can offer you. We can take the stress out of SEO and the dilemmas out of your design quandaries.